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Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Remember Our Sandwich Cookies And Other Flavors?

For those of you who have been part of our Bodacious Community since the very beginning, you'll remember, at one time, we offered a multitude of biscuit flavors. From blueberry muffin biscuits to sandwich cookies, we made 'em. These biscuits were our own creation, not copied from other sites or recipes, and the final product was based on several trials and errors. Not only did they have to be approved by our fur-kids, our biscuits had to be pleasing to our taste buds as well.

Almost a year later into our Bodacious Biscuit Love mission, we made some changes with our labeling and became officially licensed and registered with the Department of Agriculture here in Connecticut. With those changes, we had to make some decisions.

Those decisions were based on the Connecticut Feed Law of Connecticut. And I quote,

"The Connecticut Feed Law requires that all animal feed product labels be registered with the Connecticut Dept. of Agriculture. The regulations for distributing pet treats in Connecticut deal with labeling and registration. The Label must be submitted with the registration form. It must have the product name which includes the word treat or snack, the company name and address, net weight, ingredients from largest to smallest by weight and Guaranteed Analysis for crude protein by % Min., crude fat by % Min., crude fiber by % Max. and moisture by % Max. The label will be reviewed before the registration is approved and there is an $80.00 fee. You can produce the treats in your home kitchen if there is no meat or seafood as an ingredient in them. If there is a commercial kitchen is required and FDA inspects."

The operative word is "distribute." In the state of Connecticut, the word distribute means, and again I quote, "to offer for sale, sell, exchange or barter, or to supply, furnish or otherwise provide. Donating would fall under furnish or otherwise provide."

In order to be able to put the required information on a label (crude fiber, fat, etc), we had to send a sample biscuit to a laboratory. The charge, to determine the required information for the label, is $35 PER flavor of biscuit. Then, once you have that information, the fee PER label (PER flavor) is $80. The $80 fee is something you have to pay annually PER flavor.

To break this down, if we wanted to add 3 more flavors to our selection right now, it would cost us $345 initially. Each year, we'd have to fork over $240 to keep those biscuits (labels) registered.

With all of that being said, it made sense for us to continue forth with the biscuit that was the most popular within our Bodacious Community and held up through all 4 seasons. That simply means we didn't have to worry about the temperature outdoors.

The winner was our plain peanut butter biscuits.

We can ship our plain peanut butter biscuits year round and offer them at events whether it's 90 degrees or below freezing.

Any expenses related to licensing and registration comes out of our pocket. It didn't make sense to spend that kind of money on biscuits we could only offer and donate a few months out of the year like our sandwich cookies and dried fruit selections.

What does this all mean for YOU?

Our new (additional) blog site that we're launching VERY soon will have the recipes for the biscuits we opted not to continue forth with due to the expense involved with labeling and registration. We still make these biscuits for our fur-kids and we want to give you that option to share these delicious biscuits with YOUR fur-kids.

Or, to munch on with your fur-kids. We have no shame in admitting the amount of times we reach for a few biscuits to snack on ourselves.

That's another thing you can look forward to when we launch our new blog site. We're super excited. However, you still have to wait a wee bit longer. We're almost there.